[OWW-Discuss] Googlepedia?

[Bill F]

In the Wikipedia world, people get compensated by having their words
represent topics they want to be known for understanding or being associated
with.  Or they may want to be more involved in a community that permits them
to edit the words of others or provide/limit access to those topics. Money
or position, to date, have not been relevant.

Google's pushing a more closed model in which people's content is paid for.
This is a more Wikia-like approach. Google is cutting out the middle-man. If
Google can charge less and provide access to more searchers, Google will
take business from Wikia.

I don't see Wikipedia impacted greatly by this. Google clearly wants to find
ways to starve the for-profit side of the Wikimedia Foundation of revenue .
This keeps Wikimedia from developing a search engine better than the present
one.

If Wikimedia, both Wikia and Wikipedia,  succeeds in keeping viewers from
navigating back to Google for searching, it will mean a lot of money and
increased control for Wikia. Alexa ranks Wikia at 580 now. But they grew 51%
in reach and over 250% in traffic in the last 3 months. Wikipedia hovers
around thr 8th highest ranked site. These are daunting figures.

Google still wants part of that growth for itself, despite the act that it
is also directly fueling Google's profits: all paid ads on Wikia are from
Google. Google is throwing relatively cheap R&D/operation dollars at the
issue. It's good business.


On Dec 14, 2007 9:59 AM, Ricardo Vidal <rvidal at gmail.com> wrote:

> This could actually be a product of their acquisition of JotSpot<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JotSpot>- a structured wiki for small/medium sized businesses.
>
> On Dec 14, 2007 1:46 PM, Barry Canton < bcanton at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> > Google is testing a new project that sounds like an attempt to compete
> > with Wikipedia.
> >
> > http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html
> >
> > An interesting sentence - " At the discretion of the author, a knol may
> > include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the
> > author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads."
> >
> > --
> > Barry Canton
> > Endy Lab
> > Biological Engineering Division
> > Massachusetts Institute of Technology
> >
> > Tel.:(617) 401-7320 (Grand Central)
> > Email1: bcanton at mit.edu
> > Email2: bcanton at gmail.com
> >
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> >
>
>
> --
> Ricardo Vidal
> e: rvidal at gmail.com
> w: http://my.biotechlife.net
> skype: icky_bu
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